Ukrainian multi-instrumentalist musician, producer, composer, founder and keyboardist/percussionist of the band Go_A.
The winner of the 2020 National Selection with the song "Nightingale". The representative of Ukraine at the 64th Eurovision Song Contest in the Netherlands with the song "Noise", where the Go_A band took 5th place in the final, and 2nd place according to the results of the audience vote.
Biography
Born in 1982 in Kyiv. At first, the parents wanted to name their son Maxim, the name "Taras" was announced as a joke.
Taras was raised by his mother, Olga Shevchenko, head of the department of foreign languages at the university, his grandmother, Lidia Levchuk, a doctor and the niece of director Tymofiy Levchuk, and his great-grandmother, Yevgenia Tebenchuk, a school teacher of Ukrainian language and literature. In his childhood, instead of traditional lullabies, his mother sang Taras songs from classic English-language films such as "Romeo and Juliet", and his great-grandmother told stories from her life - childhood in tsarist Russia, the revolution, the Holodomor, the Second World War and the post-war years. Also, mother was a fan of The Beatles and a connoisseur of Western music, so at home Taras constantly listened to music on records - Beatles, Boney M, Zodiacks, Ottawan and other artists.
After the accident at the Chornobyl NPP, Taras' parents moved him to Klaipeda (Lithuania), where he lived until 1989. Since Taras did not know the Lithuanian language, he spent most of his free time reading books and listening to the radio.
In the 6th grade, he sang in the school folk choir, around the same time Taras first heard and saw a clip of the Queen band, which later influenced his desire to pursue music.
At the age of 13, Taras' parents sent him to a guitar class at a music school, where he studied until the age of 16.
Education
1998–2003, 2015–2017 — KNEU named after Vadym Hetman.
2003 — Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada).
Career
From 2003 to 2016, he worked at the ERC company as a product manager (specialty: PBX and IP telephony), in 2016 he resigned and got a job as a sound engineer/arranger at the recording studio "LSD Records", where at that time Go_A's album "Go to the Sound" was recorded ".
In 2019, he resigned from "LSD Records" and together with sound engineer Vyacheslav Sobolev opened his own recording studio "Kobzar Records", where "Nightingale" and "Shum" were later written.
Musical creativity
At the age of 13, Taras' mother gave Taras a simple synthesizer-"self-player", with which he assembled his first band, where he was the keyboard player and wrote all the music. Later, at the age of 14, he gathers another band in which he plays thrash metal, already on the guitar.
In 1998, he started making music on the computer and together with his classmate Oleksiy Potapenko formed the hip-hop group MCLB, which existed until 2001.
In 2001-2002, he played in the band UGO and wrote most of the music for the debut album "Mafia".
In 2002, together with his friend Dmytro Ivanov and Potap as a producer, he created the nu-metal band "Hurricane Z", which was later joined by drummer Vasyl Pereverzev (TOL, PND) and vocalist Oleksii Shmanev (Karna, ENTREE). The band disbanded in 2003, without giving a single concert.
In 2002–2003, he wrote a solo album under the pseudonym DJ Doc. The album is not published, but the song "On my own wave" is included in Potap's debut album.
From 2003 to 2009, Taras plays guitar in several bands, mainly nu-metal and death metal, for which he writes almost all the music and at the same time makes custom arrangements and writes songs in trance and drum'n'base styles for his own fun.
In 2007, Taras became interested in playing the percussion and for the next few years studied playing the darbuka and djembe.
In 2009, together with his friends, he creates the groove-metal band "Fat from Mars", which includes the ex-vocalist of the band "Skinhate" Yevhen "Zh. K." please The band performed successfully during 2010, but disbanded in 2011 due to the lack of visible prospects for the band and unwillingness to continue playing such music.
In 2011-2012, he played drums in the Brazilian Drummers' Orchestra "Samburushka".
In 2015, he recorded parts of the synthesizers/sampler for the album "Remember Who You Are" by the band "Morphine Suffering".
Go_A
In 2011, inspired by the work of Atmasfera, Infected Mushroom, Pendulum and Nero, he decides to create an electronic project that will play live with ethnic instruments, but he sees reggae-style vocals there. Everything changes after, during a trip to India, Taras gets to a theater performance, during which a girl performs a Ukrainian folk song on stage - after that, there is a desire to add Ukrainian folk singing to the project. At the same time, he decides to call his project "Go_A". Despite the fact that Taras's main musical instrument is the guitar, in Go_A he stands behind the keyboard/sampler, because "if not me, then who?".
In 2012, he met the singer Kateryna Pavlenko, recorded the song "Awakening" with her, and then invited Kateryna to the band.
In 2015, Go_A won the contest "The Best Track in Ukraine" and the song "Vesnyanka" entered the rotation on radio "Kiss FM", where it took 1st place in the hit parade "10Dance" for 6 weeks in a row.
In 2019, the group released the single "Early-early", which was received by the music producer Ukrainian NatsvidRuslan Kvinta's Eurovision Song Contest and he invites the band to take part in the National Selection. Go_A wins the contest with the song "Nightingale", receiving the highest score from the jury and the audience. Eurovision 2020 was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Go_A represented Ukraine the following year at Eurovision 2021 with the song "Noise", where they won 5th place in the general vote and 2nd place in the audience vote.
After Eurovision, the song "Noise" topped the ranking of the most popular tracks on the streaming platform "Spotify", and became the first ever Ukrainian-language song to enter the Billboard hit parade. At the end of 2021, "Noise" was ranked 3rd among the 250 most popular songs of all time in Eurovision "ESC Top 250".
Discography
Albums
Year Artist Name of the album
1999 MCLB We play what we can
2000 MCLB Summer
2001 Potap & DJ Doc How many empty words have been spoken
2001 Potap & DJ Doc When ideas run out
2002 UGO Mafia (in part)
2003 Frunze 103 Diagnosis
2007 New'Z'cool School, Bones, Rap (partly)
2015 Morphine Suffering Remember Who You Are (synthesizer, sampler)
2016 Go_A Go for the sound
Singles
Year Artist Song title
2002 LBC (Left Bank Clan) Zvezda
2003 Potap On his own wave (music)
2010 Fat from Mars FEAR
2010 Fat from Mars O. B.
2010 Fat from Mars Zigmund
2012 Go_A Christmas carol
2013 Go_A Awakening
2017 Go_A Generous Evening (with Katya Chilly)
2018 T@urus Who are you (from Dima Libra)
2019 Go_A Early-Early
2019 Go_A Nightingale
2020 taras shevchenko Ty meni ne tych
2021 Go_A Noise
Remixes
Year Artist Song title
2016 Mnishek Sun (T@urus remix)
2017 Sonya Kay Rai (Inchi De Potro remix)
2017 Somersault Back Oh Mom (LSD & Inchi de Porto Remix)
